The Dionysian Experience
This is an essay I wrote during the Classical Mythology class my senior year of college. It does have some flaws, but I am quite satisfied with how well it turned out. As I made a commitment to put it up sometime this month, and there are only several more hours left in October, it should be put here tonight.
Professor Bradbury, who taught the class, provided us with a very rich array of essay topics. I chose this one, partially because I decided I needed to meditate on Dionysos, but also because I was swamped with work beforehand. Writing about it inspired this post in 2008.
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In Euripides’s Bacchae, Dionysos offers a clear choice to Thebes: the city may either accept his divinity or face the wrath of the god. While one clearly sees that the majority of Thebes denies Dionysos’s divinity, it remains for us to analyze precisely what accepting this deity means and whether or not the forces this god presides over can be easily controlled by mortals. I argue that to accept Dionysos, one must accept both the freedom of the individual and the transcendence of self—an inherent paradox. Mortals cannot control the gifts from this god because self-transcendence requires sacrificing one’s ego and, therefore, one’s control over situations. We will analyze the Bacchae’s chorus to see what they have accepted with the deity, followed by exploring the fire imagery associated with the god and the freedom associated with accepting Dionysos.
The chorus provides a unique lens for scrutinizing what Dionysos offers humanity because the chorus exists primarily outside the action. Unlike Agave, Pentheus, or even Teiresias, the chorus does not have motivation beyond glorifying the god Dionysos. Through their hymns of praise, we begin to see what the deity promises his worshipers in return for their devotion: “Blessèd is he who hallows his life in the worship of god, / he whom the spirit of god possesseth, who is one / with those who belong to the holy body of god” (Bacchae, 72-4). Here we see that Dionysos possesses even those who accept him, and that this possession becomes a blessing when voluntary. (However, this has a darker side: “possession” was used against Thebes when Dionysos possessed their women, giving them no choice but to follow him.) The transition in this passage from mysteries of god, worship of god, dance of god, body of god, wand of god, to the final cry of “[b]lessèd, blessèd are they: Dionysos is their god!” (Bacchae, 70-82) The effect is twofold: at the beginning, the language of our translation separates the god from his worshipers. They use and do things that belong to god, and the primary emphasis rests on what these individuals must do to gain his praise. However, the ending statement brings the god into the realm of mortals—he belongs to those who surrender to him. This means that humans have causal control over the dynamics of their relationship with Dionysos once they have surrendered themselves to him. Dionysos acts as an intermediary between these fortunate ones, their senses, and the real world. In short, one must relinquish one’s own control over the self and situations, transcending pride and the ego, to achieve freedom through Dionysos.
A second set of phrases spoken by the chorus has quite similar language in our translation to the section of the play discussed above. They differ in that they begin to resemble maxims, giving more precise advice about behavior outside of cultic acts:
Blessèd is he who escapes a storm at sea,
who comes home to his harbor.
Blessèd is he who emerges from under affliction.
In various ways one man outraces another in the
race for wealth and power.
Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes.
A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry.
But he who garners day by day the good of life,
he is happiest. Blessèd is he. (Bacchae, 902-11)
The affliction refers to Pentheus’s refusal to give Dionysos the respect that a deity deserves, slighting the god. While one can certainly understand that a ruler may not want his city to honor a deity whom he knows nothing about, Dionysos has already proven his divinity to Pentheus’s blind eyes. Dionysos, who has chosen to embark on mystic religion, desires also to make his mysteries universal: “Did the god declare / that just the young or just the old should dance? / No, he desires his honor from all mankind. / He wants no one excluded from his worship” (Bacchae, 206-9). The chorus’s phrasing indicates that it views Pentheus’s denial of Dionysos’s divinity as a denial of the self, or a refusal of the god’s hospitality.
To understand more completely what Dionysos, the god who presides over wine and ecstasy, gives to his worshipers, we must understand an additional dimension. In some sections of the play, Euripides refers to wine as a drink that makes mortals forget their afflictions, describing it similarly to the waters of Lethe that in the underworld (Buxton, 208-9). Dionysos’s gift to humanity, according to Teiresias, follows this mode: “For fulfilled with that good gift, / suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it / comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles / of the day. There is no other medicine / for misery” (Bacchae, 279-83). When we compare this to statements from the Dionysian/Orphic mysteries that warn people not to drink from the river Lethe, but from Mnemosyne after they have died, the link between wine and the “oblivion of troubles” indicates that Dionysos privileges a psychological respite from suffering in the mortal world (Graf, 5). Teiresias also views the deity as an intermediary god, which Euripides also emphasizes through the intense interaction with mortals.
However, what Dionysian worshipers accept from the god does not submit to mortal control easily. We have already seen how the “blessèd” statements show that one must relinquish power to gain the benefits of a relationship with Dionysos—it requires a transcendence of the self. To explore this uncontrollable aspect of the Dionysian experience further, we can examine the imagery associated with the god—in particular, those sections in which Euripides links the god to fire. The description of Dionysos’s first birth reveals that Semele “bore him once / in labor bitter; lightning-struck, / forced by fire that flared from Zeus” (Bacchae, 88-90). The child, born of light, was midwifed by the divine fire that incinerated his mother. Pentheus also connects Dionysian worship to the uncontrollable aspect of fire, saying “[l]ike a blazing fire / this Bacchic violence spreads” (Bacchae, 777-8).
Fire links Dionysos to Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to humanity in a fennel stalk (Works and Days, 25). If fire can represent the power of civilization, then Dionysos’s power arose concurrently with civilization because the creation of wine, while it does relax inhibitions, is a civilized, deliberate action. Unlike Prometheus, who takes humanity’s side, Dionysos does not refrain from punishing individual human beings and cities in pursuit of his divine regency—and he does not refrain from using fire as a tool to accomplish his desires. In this play, he punishes Thebes because it has dishonored him and forsaken his divinity, and the god will induce Pentheus to set fire to his own home. The god uses fire as a weapon elsewhere: when the chorus describes him, they say that “[f]lames float out from his trailing wand / as he runs, as he dances, / kindling the stragglers, / spurring with cries, / and his long curls stream to the wind!” (Bacchae, 144-150). The uncontrollability is shown in the way Dionysos carries the fire and in the way he carries himself—the god with the unbound hair invites a relaxation of inhibition.
The benefits of worship that the chorus praises, in requiring the individual to relinquish control to the deity, become curses when the individual does not respect Dionysos’s power. Those who defy god invite the darker side of his passions, so the god retains control of the relationship. Pentheus believes that he retains control in the play, whereas the god manipulates even Pentheus’s perceptions. The altered state of consciousness that willing (and unwilling) Dionysian worshipers find themselves in defies human control because Dionysos exists parallel to, yet not within, civilization. Those active Bacchantes of Dionysos find themselves liberated when bound by civilization’s laws, symbolized in the tragedy by the prison guards’ inability to keep the Bacchantes imprisoned: “The chains on their legs snapped apart / by themselves. Untouched by any human hand, / the doors swung wide, opening of their own accord” (Bacchae, 447-9). According to Dionysos’s will, they leave their prison—the miracle of the god uses them as ammunition in the destruction of Pentheus.
Dionysos directly controls the Bacchantes when he prompts them to take vengeance on Pentheus, who witnesses their rites as an outsider to the god’s mysteries. When the Bacchantes “[know] his cry / the clear command of god,” the messenger who went with Pentheus and Dionysos to the Bacchantes says that the worshipers’ feet are “maddened / by the breath of god” (Bacchae, 1088-94). The gifts and miracles that Dionysos had given them turn on the individual who defies god. Transcendence of the individual makes them all behave as a collective, and the Dionysian power overwhelms their senses enough to supplant the traditional ties between a mother and her child, forcing Agave to do in the fit of Dionysian frenzy to do what no sensible Greek woman could have done.
To conclude, those who accept the god Dionysos receive some measure of protection from the deity, providing that they follow the god’s customs and honor him in the appropriate way. An individual’s acceptance of Dionysos does not necessarily mean that she can control what the god gives her, as the nature of wine and the primal, ecstatic experience sometimes venture outside the bounds of conventional society. Like fire, the god Dionysos requires that an individual approach him with caution and respect to prevent ruin.
Euripides. The Bacchae. Euripides V. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.
Hesiod. Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. Trans. Daryl Hine. Chicago: University of Chiago Press, 2005.
Buxton, Richard. Complete World of Greek Mythology. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Graf, Fritz, and Sarah Iles Johnston. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets. New York: Routeledge, 2007. Read more...
